iAttend: A Real-Time Attendance Monitoring System using Face Recognition Technique

Abstract

In education, accurate and efficient attendance tracking is critical. This paper presents iAttend, a real-time, face recognition-based attendance system that automates attendance management using computer vision and machine learning. Built with Python-Flask, OpenCV, and the face_recognition library, iAttend enables secure, contactless verification through live webcam feeds, matching captured faces with pre-encoded data. Attendance entries include time, date, subject, and teacher identity, stored in a structured CSV format for analysis. A student dashboard provides dynamic summaries and subject-wise attendance percentages. Testing achieved over 95% recognition accuracy under well-lit indoor conditions, with sessions for a 30-student class completing in under a minute. Despite challenges like lighting sensitivity and absence of liveness detection, iAttend demonstrates practicality, scalability, and cost-effectiveness. Future work will focus on mobile support, cloud integration, and enhanced biometric features.

Introduction

iAttend is an AI-driven, face-recognition–based attendance system designed to automate and improve student attendance tracking in educational institutions. It leverages artificial intelligence, computer vision, and web technologies (built on the Flask framework) to capture live video feeds and identify students in real time, thereby eliminating errors, manual effort, and proxy attendance common in traditional systems. The system provides secure, role-based web access for teachers and students, offering personalized dashboards, downloadable attendance reports, and efficient management of attendance records.

Unlike fingerprint or card-based methods, iAttend offers contactless, hygienic attendance tracking with scalability for future enhancements such as cloud deployment, analytics, geofencing, and LMS integration. The system uses deep learning-based face recognition models and encodes student faces into embeddings for quick comparison and identification. Teacher authentication and subject-wise attendance tracking ensure secure and context-aware sessions.

iAttend addresses challenges in lighting, spoofing, and privacy by optimizing recognition algorithms, session controls, and metadata logging. Its modular design supports future upgrades like liveness detection and edge AI deployment. Comprehensive testing demonstrates its accuracy, responsiveness, and usability under varied conditions.

Conclusion

The iAttend system was developed as a practical, intelligent solution for automating attendance management through real-time facial recognition. Its primary objective was to eliminate the inefficiencies and vulnerabilities of traditional manual and semi-automated attendance systems, offering a contactless, secure, and scalable alternative tailored for educational institutions. By integrating technologies such as Python, Flask, OpenCV, and the face_recognition library, iAttend delivers real-time face detection and identity verification with high accuracy and minimal false positives. Each attendance session is securely managed with role-based access control, ensuring that only authenticated teachers can record attendance, and each record is tagged with both subject and teacher information for accountability.The project successfully meets its design objectives, including high usability, low hardware dependency, minimal latency, and transparency in recordkeeping. iAttend’s simplicity of deployment, requiring only a standard webcam and a local server environment, makes it an attractive solution for small to medium-sized educational institutions and training centers seeking cost-effective digital transformation. However, despite its achievements, the current system has certain limitations. Recognition performance is heavily influenced by environmental factors such as lighting conditions and camera positioning. The absence of liveness detection leaves a potential vulnerability to spoofing attempts using photographs or videos. Moreover, local storage of attendance data using CSV and Pickle files limits the system’s scalability and multi-user capabilities, and it currently lacks direct integration with institutional information management systems or LMS platforms. To further enhance the robustness and utility of iAttend, several future developments are recommended. Incorporating liveness detection mechanisms such as blink detection or motion analysis would significantly improve biometric security. Cloud deployment would allow centralized data storage, real-time scalability, and access from multiple devices, while integrating with real-time databases like Firebase or MongoDB could further enhance performance. Developing a companion mobile application would expand accessibility for students and teachers, while periodic retraining of facial models could adapt the system to changes in student appearance over time. Expanding user roles to include administrative dashboards and enabling multi-classroom and multi-camera support would make the system suitable for larger institutions. Lastly, integration with institutional ERP and LMS platforms would automate reporting and streamline academic management. In conclusion, iAttend represents a major step toward smarter, more efficient academic administration by leveraging biometric technology to modernize the essential task of attendance tracking. It demonstrates how user-friendly, context-aware systems can not only automate traditional workflows but also add significant value through transparency, security, and real-time analytics. With thoughtful expansion and continuous innovation, iAttend holds strong potential to evolve into a mainstream attendance management platform for educational institutions worldwide.

References

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Copyright

Copyright © 2025 Kunal Sahu, Shubham Sahu, Ishwar Yadu, Shreya Bakhshi, Samiksha Shukla. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.